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Today's investors are like the dinosaurs of old, looking up at the sky and saying, "Hey, look at that bright shiny thing cruising right at us..."

Back then it was a meteor that created an extinction-level event for the T-Rex. Today those dinosaurs and their Patagonia vests are watching AI about to make them extinct. What it means to be a VC investor is about to change forever, not because of anything the VCs have done wrong, but because the need for them is quickly evaporating.

For a very long time, building a startup company was insanely expensive and risky. We had to pay for a ton of people, marketing, and infrastructure in hopes that the upfront investment would be worth it. But what happens when those costs plummet? What happens when we...

There are a ton of jobs we can hire for — a "Founder" isn't one of them.

Nearly all of us, at some point, dream of replacing ourselves with someone else, ideally someone that's a big level up, so that we can take the pressure off of us and enjoy the good life. But over time most of us arrive at the same conclusion — back-filling the role of "Founder" is nearly impossible.

Why is it so hard? Clearly, there are more people out there substantially more qualified than we are to run our companies. Yet, time and time again, Founders try to recruit the "perfect replacement" only to find themselves right back in the leadership chair before they know it.

The answer lies in the fact that while we can hire capabilities beyond our own, there are a few ...

If we ever plan on growing our startup, we're going to have to start saying "Yes" to a whole bunch of stuff that terrifies us.

That's right. We're going to make bold commitments to customers, investors, and even our own staff regarding stuff we're not entirely sure we can pull off. I know, I know, it sounds scary.

Any rational Founder would be asking: "How can I tell an investor we're going to grow to $100 million if I can't possibly see how we'd get there today?" or "How can I tell a customer we can do the work if we don't have enough people available right now?"

It's called "figure it out," and it's been the growth strategy of every successful startup since the dawn of time. It takes some getting used to because it logically feels disinge...

The most expensive decisions we will ever make as a Founder all come at the beginning — when we are most vulnerable.

The problem for us as Founders is we don't realize at the time just how expensive those decisions are, or that our vulnerability will dissipate over time. All we can see in that very moment is that we need "everything all at once" and anyone who is willing to take our fake Monopoly money (equity) to get it is doing us a favor.

They are not doing us a favor.

Founders can easily lose half of their company in the first year by making huge equity decisions that feel like the right decision at the time, but when looking back, become the most expensive decisions they will ever make, and ones that we can't get back.

The McRib of Co-...

Why do Founders seem so reluctant to ask for help?

We'd think in a business that involves nothing but unanswered questions, our arms would be tired from raising our hands to ask for more help. But instead, we tend to constantly motor through problems that we have no idea how to solve, or have very little experience with, as if we're the best person to solve them.

The source of this tends to be a lack of understanding. In many cases we simply don't realize that the problems we are solving already have readily available solutions, and more so, super experienced people who are more than willing to hand them to us.

It's All Been Solved Already

What if I were to tell you that nearly every problem that you're solving is only new to you as the Fo...

The sneaky secret of being a Founder is that very few people want to see us succeed.

That's kind of messed up, right? We'd think that building something new in the world, creating jobs, and pursuing our own success would be something everyone could get behind, with only "fans in the stands," as it were.

That does sound awesome, but the reality is way different. We try not to think about it and mostly don't talk about it, but the people in the stands, even when they are cheering us on, are also hoping we lose. It's an important dynamic to understand for Founders who are becoming successful for the first time, and how success can sometimes make people's view of us worsen.

Why People Want Us to Fail

I could get into some deep psychology here,...

The new mark of a standout Founder is no longer how big they can make their staff — it's how small they can keep it.

Oh, how times have changed, my friends. For hundreds of years, we graded the value and success of a company based on how "big" it had become, and headcount was always the leading indicator. "We've scaled to 1,000 people!" would have been the badge of honor up until the past year, and now it begs the most obvious question, "Why?"

We're entering the Age of Efficiency, where we are rewarded not for a bloated headcount but for a tiny headcount that can produce even greater output. And I've got to say — I couldn't be happier about it because, as startups, this is the dream we've all been waiting for.

AI Changed the Game

Let's star...

What an exciting moment! You’re looking to scale up your startup and need to bring in a growth agency to help you do that. But, it’s a big decision. Choosing the wrong agency will lead to months of delayed growth, thousands of dollars in wasted spend, and difficult conversations down the line trying to understand where it all went wrong.

This means it is vitally important you make the right decision from the get-go. There are hundreds of marketing agencies out there, but if you are in the startup phase of growth I’d recommend going with a startup growth agency that has experience in the earlier stages.

I have done some of the research for you by putting together a list of the top 9 startup agencies I know deliver great results. So, at least...

"Never tell anyone how much money you have. They will only judge you by it or try to take it from you."

That was some of the best advice I've ever gotten from the son of a well-known billionaire after my first startup just started to take off. At the time, I had just started to make some money, and like any poor kid who just came into some cash, I wanted the whole world to know just how well I had done.

So yeah, I was the douchebag posting pictures of my Lamborghini, only social media didn't exist yet, so I guess I was just emailing them, which is way worse! Little did I know at the time how much trouble my personal PR campaign would create for me.

They Will Only Judge You by it

One of the things I first started noticing was that everyone w...

Most startups launch with $0 in funding, but no one ever really explains how the hell they do it. We keep saying, "They bootstrapped it," as if that explains anything other than "They didn't take on investors." What the heck does that even mean? What it is intended to mean is that we find creative ways to compensate people and buy things that don't involve using cash in the bank.

We can't possibly cover every use case of how startups find resources for $0, but let's take a look at the most popular categories that people run around looking for money for and see how we make it work.

Paying for People

Figuring out how to compensate people is where we're often stuck first. Most of us are familiar with paying folks with equity, but that's not th...